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Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Swedish city

100 cars, involving a vehicle manufacturer, real customers, legislators, transport authorities, and a major city

May 5, 2014

(Credit: Volvo)

Volvo Car Group’s “Drive Me” project — featuring 100 self-driving Volvos on public roads in everyday driving conditions — is moving forward rapidly, with the first test cars now driving around the Swedish city of Gothenburg.

“This is an important step towards our aim that the final ‘Drive Me’ cars will be able to drive the whole test route in highly autonomous mode. The technology, which will be called Autopilot, enables the driver to hand over the driving to the vehicle, which takes care of all driving functions.”

All key players involved

What makes the ‘Drive Me’ project unique is that it nvolves all the key players: legislators, transport authorities, a major city, a vehicle manufacturer, and real customers. The customers will drive the 100 cars in everyday driving conditions on approximately 50 kilometers of selected roads in and around Gothenburg. These roads are typical commuter arteries, including motorway conditions and frequent queues.

“Drive Me — self-driving cars for sustainable mobility” is a joint initiative between Volvo Car Group, the Swedish Transport Administration, the Swedish Transport Agency, Lindholmen Science Park and the City of Gothenburg. The Swedish Government is endorsing the project.

Volvo Cars will play a leading role in the world’s first large-scale autonomous driving pilot project in which 100 self-driving Volvo cars will use public roads in everyday driving conditions around the Swedish city of Gothenburg. The ground-breaking project ‘Drive Me — Self-driving cars for sustainable mobility’ is a joint initiative between Volvo Car Group, the Swedish Transport Administration, the Swedish Transport Agency, Lindholmen Science Park and the City of Gothenburg. The ‘Drive Me’ project is endorsed by the Swedish Government. The aim is to pinpoint the societal benefits of autonomous driving and position Sweden and Volvo Cars as leaders in the development of future mobility.

You can write software to cope with any number of scenarios. Control systems can react very rapidly and stabilise the vehicle – just like fly-by-wire in an inherently unstable aircraft. My point is that there is a very large number of scenarios, and combinations of scenarios, that needs to be handled. This means lots of code and huge complexity, making it almost impossible to test every line and every possible execution path.

Books like Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow describe how long it takes for a person to accumulate so much experience that they react fast with ‘intuitive’ good sense to an unusual situation. A highly experienced human driver can react with an excellent solution to an unexpected road situation. But how many of the drivers on the road are at that level of expertise? Maybe it takes ten years of daily driving to get there. So drivers with less experience than that are likely to choose the wrong solution. If that person is in front or behind you, you are at high risk. Autonomous driving systems will capture most of the skill of a great driver. They will perform WAY better than the inexperienced drivers that are on the road and currently create most of the havoc.

A simple temperature and moisture sensor can put the car in “ice” mode long before a human (inside the warm cabin, with the stereo on, eating a burger) will. Anti-lock braking systems and traction control far exceed human capabilities to break/steer/accelerate on ice.

How safe is this? Other safety-critical systems, e.g. aircraft controls, nuclear power stations, railway signalling, are kept very simple because the amount of testing needed to ensure reliability increases almost exponentially with the size of the software. To drive a car the software has to fulfil an incredibly complex set of requirements – can this be done without bugs? I don’t believe software of this complexity can be delivered to safety-critical standards. Society accepts the cost of driver error but what happens when automated cars start killing people?

Flight is far more complex to manage than driving on roads with defined boundaries, signage, signals, etc. Driving is simple: control your speed. Based on your speed, maintain a safe distance from other objects. Navigate turn-by-turn to your destination.

It is human emotion that makes these simple rules “hard” to follow. Boredom, attention competition, aggression, sleepiness. Remove these and roads will be exponentially safer. And people more productive (mostly because many will still be alive).

Also, a minor accident I was in this year resulted in $25K in medical costs plus property damages. Because someone was texting and rear-ended two cars. Scenarios like this waste billions in resources, and are simply the cost of human error writ large.

I think that self-driving is the KEY to sustainability in cars/vehicles. Once the vehicle can take itself to a nearby charging station, or somehow accept small charges along the route by steering close to a charge source, then the battery on board can be 100 pounds or less instead of 800 pounds and there is no need for a second drive train. How is this step to over 200 MPGe not qualified as sustainable technology?

The article actually says sustainable mobility. Mobility = “the ability to move or be moved freely” I don’t think they are off target by saying this. They are not actually talking about sustainability towards changing the existing state of affair of what cars are doing to the environment but rather the human experience freeing us from the enslavement of driving. One can also argue that driving is not sustainable because of the huge number of deaths it causes each year. We need this change.

I think the fact the buji keyed on the term “sustainable” regardless of context is the point buji was trying to make. It’s a term that conservationists and ecologists have used to designate some technologies as more environmentally benign than others. For a car company to co-opt the term in their public relations marketing can (and should) be viewed as deliberately self-serving and misleading. I’m glad it was pointed out.

We do need improvements in transportation. Also in communicating the ideas that go into the proposed improvements.

I still like the idea of self-driving cars. Driving for me is such an inefficient and stressful process. I’m looking forward to the time when the test subject is sitting in the back seat rather than behind the wheel and can show data that indicates there is time and fuel savings in addition to no collisions.

How quickly can engineers re-design a car with no steering wheel?

How quickly can hackers create their own self-driving vehicles and abandon the driver’s seat without getting “permission” from the powers that be? I’m not suggesting a militia movement which views all government with suspicion but a group of people who can understand and trust the technology which would make a self-driving car possible.

And I’d still like the cars of the future to get me to my destination more quickly.

Yes this is all good progress but do they really need to use the word “sustainable”? Ok, you can have better energy resource management using automation, but I feel it’s a bit thin to throw in one of the “save the planet” words just for the sake of it. Vehicle and oil companies love doing this far too much.